WHAT I DESERVED

BERNARD S. AARONSON

While I shall try to be accurate, it is hard to be completely accurate. The events were in many ways hazy even as they took place, and the record of the first half of the session, including the beginning and the peak of the experience, was unfortunately destroyed, so I have nothing to refer to. Fortunately, H. kept some notes, so I have a rough chronology.
Another problem is the difficulty in putting these experiences into words and having the words mean the same thing to the reader that they do to me. Perfect communication is probably never attainable. The approximation will have to be enough.

I received two hundred gamma of LSD-25 at 9:45 A.M. in distilled water. It tasted very salty and left a salty, bitter taste in my mouth for a long time. I have since been able to ascertain that it was the water, not the LSD, that was responsible for the taste. The session was carried out in my laboratory, in very familiar surroundings.

At 9:55, I experienced a mild sense of ataxia as I walked along the hall. I gradually developed a sense of strangeness, and I felt stimulated and mildly drunk. Subsequently I felt muscle tension all over my body, but especially in the back and around the nape of the neck. My stomach felt queasy, as if with suppressed excitement, and I felt tenseness in the back of the throat. The floor seemed to be revolving in the room to some extent, and I seemed to lose sensation, in the cheeks and jaws especially but also all over my torso. The internal symptoms subsided, but the muscular symptoms in the back and neck and the loss of sensation around the jaws returned throughout the day and signaled my going in and coming out of the states.

The first visual experience was a series or transient palings of color all over the room, which began at io:15. Periodically there seemed to be flashes of white lightning. In between, everything seemed very distinct and very beautiful. I became increasingly euphoric and laughed a great deal.

A bird flew toward the window of our room seeming to be flying abnormally slowly. We then heard a clatter from outside behind our building, and I went to the window that faced the rear of the building. B. was walking back toward the building with an empty trash can. His face seemed covered with white grease paint, and he seemed a sad clown. He smiled and waved up at me. We were listening to a record of Plains Indians songs and dances, and every time the drum beat, the light in the room would get brighter. I closed my eyes and saw lettering on stone in the shape of the Hebrew letters shin and tsaddik. As I think about it, these letters may represent portents of what I really wanted the experience to do for me. According to Feuchtwanger in his novel Power, shin is a symbol for wisdom and is represented by the pattern of lines over the bridge of the nose of the cabbalists. Tsaddik may be a pun on tsadduk, the holy, wise miracle workers of the Hassidic Jews. Starlings walking among the trees outside seemed to be touched with red at the tips of their beaks and the ends of their tails. I was reminded of the story of the phoenix and talked about it for a time.

At 10:35 my hands seemed to me to be shaking, although H. said they seemed unusually steady. I noted that I was short, and expressed resentment that I was not as tall as the rest of my siblings. I felt psychotic and was quite pleased. I began to laugh hilariously. I wanted to call my wife to ask her, "What's new, pussycat?" and also to call an absent friend, but H. would not give me permission to use the telephone and I had to grant that he was right. About this time I suddenly perceived H. as Old Scratch, and he seemed suddenly quite cruel for a brief moment. I was not frightened, for he was after all old H., whom I like and respect very much. I don't know why I should see my good English friend as an Early American devil. He denied the identification, and I believe I even had to explain to him who Old Scratch was.

H. and I talked a great deal throughout the day. He was always kind, forbearing, and understanding, even though I pointed out to him several times that he was such a compulsive talker that I was afraid he might interfere with my experience. He definitely did not talk too much, and was always tactful and sensitive, even when I made this rude remark. I remember discussing how comedy and tragedy were really the same and how a pie in the face might be funny to an uninvolved onlooker, but a calamity to the person it hit. Throughout the day I was involved with getting him to understand my exact nuances of meaning, and I felt hurt that he could not obtain more than an approximation of what I was saying.

At ii A.m., with my eyes shut, I saw myself with a brown skin, walking in the market place of a strange city. Surrounded by brown-skinned people, I thought I was in a city in India or Portugal. It was obviously my city, and I knew my way around it. Most of the people around and I myself were wearing white clothing. Suddenly I heard a baby crying and commented, "Always there is a baby crying." I wondered to myself if this was a memory from a previous existence, and scolded myself for thinking such nonsense. I then had the first of many epiphanies, which I have forgotten, although I have a sense that much was going on. I became determined to examine and triumph over my problems and especially to solve the riddle of life and death. At some point I viewed the world as a battleground between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and identified myself with the former. I noted an absence of Buddhist sentiment, and H. pointed out that I had after all been reared in a Judaeo-Christian tradition. I noted that the cognitive changes that I was experiencing were far more striking than the perceptual changes and wondered whether the drug acts to disarrange the controlling, essentially verbal formulae that govern the organism, rather than to affect perception directly.

We then went downstairs, out among the trees. It was 11:35. The stairway seemed unusually long and steep. I sat on the top step and contemplated it. We went down and I stood among the trees, wondering what it was like to be a tree. The M.'s drove by and stopped. I described N. M. as a wine tree, I am told. I remember being impressed by the fact that she was wearing brown shoes that were roots. M. seemed to move swiftly and gracefully, with many bowing and scraping movements. Their little boy was with them, and his eyes seemed to be at once shy, observant, and laughing. M. reminded me of an Arabian Nights djinn. After they drove away, I ran after their car, anxious to know whether they were going to Troy. I was especially anxious to know if N. M. was going to Troy, but although they stopped their car to hear me, N. did not seem to know what Troy was. Obviously not a part of the Achaean host!

H. and I then went back under the trees. I examined one tree with rather rough bark and was very impressed with its fantastic roughness. The trees did not seem altered in any way. Each was unmistakably a tree, full and sufficient unto itself, and nothing more. We sat on the bench under the trees and talked about the loneliness of being, and how people are forever needing things they expect you to provide. For what seemed a long time, I cried as I have not cried since I was a baby, for all the people in the world who need things and whose needs cannot be met. I cried, too, for all the people around me who need things from me that I botched in the giving or to whom I cannot give because I am depleted. I wept for my wife and for my son and was especially concerned about him because of a feeling of special responsibility springing from the fact that I generated him. I expressed great hostility toward both my parents, and with H.'s help analyzed my feelings as they derived from my relationship to each of them. I examined my relationship with my next older brother, and examined the meaning in my life of my relationship with that friend whom I love the most. Many times in the course of this I would be seized by an epiphany and I do not know where I went or what I did there.

At 12:45 we went back upstairs. H. felt that I should look at myself in a mirror, and I did, but I never changed, although I looked periodically for several hours. I was always myself. The only changes that I noted were the changes in my expression as a function of how I was feeling. I talked about how one had to give oneself up to experience and about the importance of being. I continued to express great sadness for others. H. mentioned my relationship with someone whom I hated, and I flew into a rage in which I identified that person as a Nazi. While I did this, I had a sense of, but did not see, stone, cement, and blood. I talked about the relation among past, present, and future, and recognized how each person is more than just a collection of needs. At :5o I read Fern Hill and was greatly moved. I talked about Homer, my own work, and the relation of poetry to science. I discussed my very early identification with Ulysses and my recent reading of Hermann Hesse. I asked H. to read to me from the Manual of Psychedelic Experience sometime here, but rejected it as irrelevant to what I was experiencing.

Depth seemed expanded during this part of the experience, but objects seemed closer. H. suggested that the perception of distance and the perception of depth might be separate things. The floor seemed to tilt markedly toward the side of the room in which we were sitting, and I wondered that I had not observed this before. I have checked this since the experience, and the floor does slope that way, but not nearly so markedly as I saw it. We went out on the porch, and I was impressed by how the tree that grows near the building seemed to float and how the road changed briefly after every car passing over it. I got hungry, and we ate some fruit, the first of many such adventures from this point on.

Later in the day there was again an increase in the profundity of the experience. From a discussion of parenting in general and mothering in particular, I went on to a discussion of my son and my relations with him, and finally cried for him for a long time. I did not want H. to help me through this situation, but I had to find my way myself. At the end of an epiphany of sorrow with my eyes dosed, I saw a cave. I had a feeling of wings, and followed them up to the roof of the cave, which was like a basilica bathed in white light, which glowed through it. Gradually the light turned a bright yellow, and the light point was the sun, which moved back and forth like lightning. This vision ended and another vision replaced it in which I was moving toward the left along a series of intricately carved, horizontally placed poles. These suddenly parted and I looked into the face of The Dancer, who was wearing an Indian (Eastern) headdress, and then the poles closed. I was able to come out of the experience after this.

From this point on, the experience began to abate, although residuals of the experience remain even today as I write this. Later in the day I had a sense of bulls and stone porches, and read H. the entire Lament for the Death of Ignacio Scinchez Mejias, by Lorca, which moved me greatly and seemed in some way to be about and for me. We continued discussing the thoughts and ideas brought up by the day and dealt with some new issues as well. I noticed that whenever I dealt with questions that had emotional relevance for me, perceptual changes occurred. When I paid attention to the perceptual changes, they disappeared. There was a very interesting phenomenon, which lasted for a while, in which one particular patch of ground began to bubble and boil. This did not spread to any other part of the ground and was there to see whenever I chose to look at it.

We returned to my home at about 10 P.M. My wife looked healthy and sunburned, pretty and petulant. I sat up for a while reading. I read a book of Zen koans and they made a great deal of sense emotionally. Not all of them seemed applicable, but those that did, I understood intuitively, and I understood the events of the story even before I read the solution. When I finally went to bed, I had such brilliant hypnagogic visions of colored snapshots of children that it was difficult to fall asleep. I also had one vision of an African drummer.

My feelings of serenity continued on the next day and continue even today. I was very impressed by the unity in nature, down to the image of a tree reflected in the veins of a lettuce leaf. My general feeling of peace has continued to the present.

What have I learned? I died and I am here, and I shall never fear dying again. The experience was not what I had expected, but it was just as much as I deserved. I feel that I am quits with life. I know that I cannot give other people anything and that they cannot give me anything. Anything I give, I give not because it is needed but because I want to. Anything I get, I get because it is available and I want it. When you are born, no trumpets blow, because there are no trumpets. While we are each totally alone, it is an error to confuse this with being lonely. Each of us is himself and there is nothing better and nothing greater and nothing more. I no longer feel concerned with God, whether or not He exists (I used to feel sure He did). He takes care of His Self, and I talce care of mine. I eat when I am hungry, I drink when I am thirsty, and, if I feel like it, I forgive when I am insulted.

1Records kept on the effectiveness of the work with the inmates at Concord indicate that, over a five-year period, more than twice the usual number of men have been able to stay out of prison after their release. The significance of these, however, is sharply reduced by the lack of a control group of inmates, which should have received an equal amount of attention from us while not using psilocybin.